Organizational justice and employee engagement Exploring the linkage in public sector banks in India Piyali Ghosh, Alka Rai and Apsha Sinha School of Management Studies, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore whether perceptions of distributive, procedural and interactional justice are related to employee engagement, as an extension of the antecedents-consequences model of Saks (2006), and to examine the possibility of inter-relationships between these three dimensions of justice. Design/methodology/approach – A survey of 210 employees of public sector banks in India covered measures of job and organization engagement (OE) proposed by Saks (2006) and the scale on distributive, procedural and interactional justice developed by Niehoff and Moorman (1993). The relationships between justice perceptions and engagement were analysed using correlations and hierarchical regression analysis. Findings – Results show that distributive, procedural and interactional are inter-related with each other. Further, distributive and interactional justice take precedence over procedural justice in determining job engagement, while distributive justice plays the most important role in determining OE, followed by procedural and interactional justice. Practical implications – By highlighting the inter-relationships among the three dimensions of justice, this study offers useful insights into the underlying processes through which job and OE can be improved through these inter-relationships. Findings also highlight the application of concepts like relative deprivation in Indian public sector banks to increase the engagement levels of their employees. Originality/value – This paper adds to the very small number of studies that have investigated the role of interactional justice in enhancing job and OEs. It has also established inter-relationships between the three dimensions of organizational justice and their individual roles in determining job and OEs. Keywords Quantitative, Employee engagement, Distributive justice, Interactional justice, Job engagement, Procedural justice, Organizational engagement Paper type Research paper Introduction The issue of justice at workplace has etched a dominant place for itself in literature. Several studies indicate that an increased sense of justice among employees can have a positive impact on various aspects of organizational behaviour, such as work satisfaction (McFarlin and Sweeney, 1992; Bhupatkar, 2003; McCain et al., 2010), organizational commitment (Folger and Konovsky, 1989; McLean, 2009; Wang et al., 2010; Crow et al., 2012; Suliman and Kathairi, 2013), organizational trust (Saunders and Thornhill, 2003; McLean, 2009), organizational citizenship behaviour (Moorman, 1991; Bhupatkar, 2003; Muhammad, 2004; Orlowska, 2011) and employee performance (Alder and Tompkins, 1997; Wang et al., 2010; Suliman and Kathairi, 2013), and thus affect customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, understanding how people make judgments about justice in their organizations and how they respond to perceived justice or injustice is a major issue, especially to develop an understanding of organizational behaviour (Maleki and Taheri, 2012). Scholars have generally identified The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm Received 21 August 2013 Revised 20 February 2014 Accepted 7 April 2014 Personnel Review Vol. 43 No. 4, 2014 pp. 628-652 r Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/PR-08-2013-0148 628 PR 43,4